End users are increasingly accessing services offered by organizations over a network. More particularly, services are often browser-enabled and include interfaces that permit an end user to access the services using a World-Wide Web (WWW) browser that is interfaced to the Internet.
Many services include a variety of processing that is often time-consuming or repetitive for end-users. As a result, the services permit preferences to be stored in local locations associated with the end-users. In many cases, these preferences are stored as WWW cookies with specific names and formats that the services can locate and consume when needed. Thus, an end-user can avoid repetitive tasks at initialization with the service by saving an appropriate service preference cookie on the end-user's computing environment or device.
Accordingly, when an end-user logs into a service via a WWW browser, the preference cookie is located and supplied automatically and seamlessly to the service. The service then processes the cookie to ensure that the end-user is configured in a manner that the end-user prefers or in a service processing state that the end-user prefers.
One major drawback with cookies and locally stored preferences in general, is that if the end-user does not always access the service from the same computing environment or device, then the preference is not obtainable and not detected. Thus, the use of cookies is valuable for a specific computing environment or device, but not truly portable for the end-user. Correspondingly, when the end-user does not use the computing device that was used to create his/her initial preference cookie, the service is unable to acquire the end-user's preference during initialization and the end-user is forced to try to remember the preference or manually recreate it within the service.
Therefore, there is a need to create improved portability techniques for maintaining preferences.